U2 fans will have to wait until late next year for a new album, the group has confirmed.
In an online interview with Rolling Stone magazine published at the weekend, the band's bassist Adam Clayton admitted that while the band had been working on new material it was unlikely to see the light of day until 2012 because it wouldn't be completed in time for a release this year.
Clayton said the band, who headline Glastonbury Festival later this month, would probably begin working on the album in earnest next February.
"We did some work on it (the album) in January. It was great progress. We worked with Danger Mouse in New York. After that, we had to have a bit of a meeting and look at the schedule for the rest of the year and see if we could pick up any extra time to work on it. We just realised that we couldn't," he said.
"To be honest, everyone was a bit gutted, because I think it would have been great to have got to the end of this year and have a new record out. It's not my favorite decision to put it back, but it was the only sensible decision," he added.
Clayton said Bono and the Edge's involvement with the troubled Broadway show Spider-man had also been a factor in not completing the new album in time.
He also admitted that while the band's last album No Line On The Horizon had gotten great reviews, it hadn't gone down so well with the band's fans.
Commenting on the fact that there were less songs from the album being played on the band's current tour, Clayton said: "There's great material on the record, but there's no point banging away songs to people who don't get it. It didn't catch fire. It's old news now. The single didn't work, and when the single doesn't work people don't have a way into the record."
The Edge told Rolling Stone that it would most likely be late next year before a new U2 album would be released.
He also dismissed negative coverage of the Spider-man musical, which was lambasted by New York critics earlier this year.
The musical, which is the most expensive show ever to hit Broadway, opened in November 2010 but closed in February for reworking following a number of bad media reviews.
"I don't really care that much about the negative media. In this instance, we were the junior partners and composers, but not the director and not the producer. We really didn't have that much significant input or control over the way things went. But we did realise there were problems. The show was actually a good show, it just wasn't great. It didn't quite work as a story. Some aspects of it were amazing," he said.
U2 recently broke the record for having the highest ever grossing concert tour. The "360" tour passed the $554 million (€384 million) record held by the Rolling Stones last month. The tour began in Barcelona in July 2009 and by the time it finishes next month, some seven million people will have seen the show.
